Tonight’s Opinion Brief is brought to you by the Humanitarian Coalition, working together to save more lives during international humanitarian disasters.
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Good evening, subscribers. Sometime in the next week or so, Elizabeth May is expected to let us in on her career plans. Most expect her to quit the Green Party leadership over the membership’s recent endorsement of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Nobody expects her to quit politics entirely; she’s too good at it, for one thing. So where does she go?

Susan Delacourt says that, based on what she’s hearing now — and May’s long history of rather collegial relations with the Liberal party — the Green leader is more likely than not to cast in with Justin Trudeau’s crowd. “In the days before he became Liberal leader, she went so far as to tell a reporter that Trudeau was much easier to work with than Thomas Mulcair or the New Democrats. (And) the NDP isn’t wild about May, either.”

L. Ian MacDonald drills down into the Trudeau government’s peculiar poll numbers, which seem to defy the ordinary laws of politics. Canadians are still expressing a high degree of confidence in the government — even as they communicate near-record levels of pessimism about the arc of the economy and their own personal prospects. “Trudeau has made ‘growing the middle class’ his signature economic and social issue, at a time when Canadians see the middle class contracting.”

And CARE Canada CEO Gillian Barth says it’s time for Canada to start investing in much longer-term efforts to alleviate poverty in developing countries. “Longer-term programming allows development partners to achieve more clear demonstrations of real change.”